Since the second most devastating school shooting in America’s history occurred on Friday, December 14, 2012 there have been numerous debates about our current gun laws.
American citizens and the government have been unnecessarily reactive about the shooting, as usual. We are worrying about if we should enforce heavier gun laws or amp up school security, when we should be worrying more about what we as a country can do to help the devastated city of Newtown, Connecticut.
According to Fox News, Obama has called for a meeting regarding new firearms restrictions. It seems that the government’s natural reaction is to call for reforms as soon as a tragedy like this happens. However, gun restrictions probably won’t fix this issue.
The problem that caused the school shooting was not lack of gun control–it was lack of humanity. And lack of humanity is something that the government can’t prevent.
Putting more restrictions on citizens’ rights to possess guns will only make it a little harder for people to obtain guns, that’s all, and they will still be able to get them at some point. Adam Lanza, for example, used his mother’s guns — he didn’t even have to go out to buy one.
Criminals will always get guns. No matter what, the government will never be able to take all of the firearms out of America. There will always be black markets and illegal sales where people can get guns. By making gun laws more strict, they will only make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to obtain guns for recreation and protection. Many people keep firearms for self protection, in case something bad happens or they need to defend themselves. If gun rights were to be taken away, it would only make things worse by taking away innocent citizens’ means of defending themselves.
By increasing prices of guns and restrictions on getting them, the government makes guns more difficult to obtain. However, by making them more difficult to obtain, it might cause other issues. Criminals don’t exactly want to put in a ton of effort and pay a fortune to go and kill people. So, they could result to stealing. If more control and higher price tags were placed on firearms, then it might cause people to start stealing guns, which presents a whole other issue.
Shootings like this can’t be prevented by gun control. If a criminal wants to go into a school and try to shoot everyone there, they will still do it. They will steal the guns if it comes to that. The only way to prevent tragedies like these is to increase school security. Rather it be the new high-tech security system at Detroit public high schools, or a simple code word over the intercom to let teachers know if someone dangerous has entered the building, all schools need to increase their security.
The honest and frightening fact of the matter is that tragedies like this aren’t something that we can control. No amount of gun control will prevent things like this from happening. The shooting in Newtown, Connecticut was tragic and it shouldn’t have happened, but there was nothing that our country could have done to prevent it.
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